DPS YEAR BLOG
The ongoing record of my Diploma in Professional Studies...
Blog Date: 29/09/23
So… Here marks the start of my DPS blog for the year. I want to check in approximately every fortnight and talk about what I’ve been up to, lessons I’ve learnt and things I’m generally excited about.
With the reintroduction of the DPS I was introduced to the live briefs. Professional briefs organised through the university that will count for 20 days of our 100 day requirement for the year. We were proposed with several briefs which we could choose to optionally get involved with. As of writing this I have not properly organised any placements or professional work, so I want live briefs to be my focus both to make up for that and because they seem like things I want to get involved with. During the meeting where we heard the synopses of each. The ones that stuck out to me were: the Netflix poster brief where we would design a poster for the MA screenwriters at LCC, the pitch for Walker books where we would pitch a children’s book to the publisher, and the Tate pitch which would involve working with the Tate gallery.
Ultimately I’ve decided to go with two, that’s how many I think I can handle this term. The MA Screenwriters brief and the Walker Books pitch. These both I think definitely match my practise as an illustrator on the IVM course. I’m especially looking forward to the Netflix brief and learning about the process of a screenwriter, and personifying a story written by someone else.
Other than this, this term I am also working on a project regarding the Topolski gallery, a relatively new gallery in Waterloo based on the artist Feliks Topolski, a significant reportage illustrator who marked many events throughout the 20th century. Sarah Temple, the leader of the DPS year, brought together a couple other illustrators and I to create some work in the style of Topolski to present to the gallery, possibly leading to an exhibition which would be very exciting. Last May we went to the crowds of the coronation and recorded as much as we could, which we’ve slowly been converting into work for a proposal to the gallery later this year. I also think it’s relevant to mention that last year I designed socks for the company Chatty Feet, this was the part of a live brief/competition in my second year that I along with another student won. I designed socks in the vein of the brand, made to look like Tim Berners-Lee, the socks are currently being produced. This is another ongoing project I feel relevant to my DPS year.
Blog Date: 13/10/23
In the past two weeks I’ve been paired with the scriptwriters for the Netflix brief, and I’ve been beginning to piece together my pitch for the Walker Books project.
We met in person for the Netflix briefs where we met all the screenwriters from the course and heard them pitch the stories. I’d already read the document so I had a decent idea on which ones were my favourite. The meeting became quite hectic when we realised there were a lot more designers than there were scripts. I watched illustrators jump to be the first to scrawl their names on the chart, a complete free for all where it seemed nobody gave any thought to organising a fair system where everyone had an equal chance. I thought about advice my tutor had given me about looking to make a proper connection with our MA students, and instead of stressing over what chance I had to get some of my favourite scripts, I cut my losses and made decisions on which scripts i thought were both great and I also had a decent chance of getting. I also struck up conversations with screenwriters I liked, got down their numbers so when (hoping) I got those scripts, I would have already made an impression.
I think I was very lucky, I was paired with two scripts, both of which I think are fascinating stories and I could already envision the places I might want to go visually. “Special Yellow Blossom,” a surrealist story about a girl in a hospice imagining possible futures her life could’ve had. To me this was massive visual potential. And another, “Somebody Screaming Somewhere,” a story about two police officers, fighting their already deep and shocking violent sexual urges before they meet and fall spiral together. I thought the story was gripping and dark and I wanted to make a noir illustration to reflect that.
This week I had my first meeting to present what I had come up with to the staff leading the brief and ‘officially’ the scriptwriters though I’ve already been texting Matthew and Oscar who wrote my stories. This week I just presented a collage of media that I wanted to visually inspire my posters. I’m proud that I didn’t actually look for posters, rather other media I already have a connection with and visuals I appreciated in them, this because I love bringing in ‘curveball’ inspirations, things that maybe you wouldn’t think elements could be pulled from into a poster. I looked at book and DVD illustrations by Geoff Grandfield, trip-hop album covers from the likes of Zero 7 and the mixed media interluding pages by David Mack in the comic Alias. I think my ideas and sketching went down well and it’s a good foundation for the posters.
Walker books too are in this stage of bringing in inspirations and ideas to make the foundation of our book pitch. Right now I’ve just got one main one. DeBlob 2 is a cult video game I've been playing. It's about an anthropomorphic blob of paint restoring colour to a world where the colour had been removed by a totalitarian government. The story is simple but between the linesI find it deeply political, the points of interest are public buildings, libraries and community centres, you take down police stations and quite obviously fight the arms of an oppressive state. I want to use this as the basis for my book, something with a message from myself about something very factual and real, hidden in a collage of colour. This is where I’m up to now.
Blog Date: 27/10/23
Most recently as I am writing this I’ve been developing my Walker Books concept. I’ve been bringing together more inspirations to determine the look, format and story of the book. I’m still working towards a title though, nothing feels right yet. I thought maybe “Extra-Ordinary” but that is already an existing property and it doesn’t feel right for a children’s book.
My current plot is about a colourless world, all black and white apart from the children. It's an analogy for the compassion and trust we have in each other when we are young, compared to the beaten down individuality and untrusting mindset that many seem to take on as we take our places in society. It’s my view on neoliberalism and the declining state of our public services and then society, ideally concentrated into a fun read for kids with some lessons about trust and seeing the good in people. I was fascinated by the illustrated/comic adaption of Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ when I went into Gosh Comics earlier this week. It combines great illustration with the pretty mature script of the original story. The Walker Books brief tells us to pitch our book to the 5-11 aged audience, which honestly seems pretty ridiculous as in that time you change so much in terms of interest, reading level etc. I think that the format of ‘Animal Farm’ shows how I can bridge those ages, a sophisticated script for the older of the children, with understandable illustrations for the younger crowd that can’t grasp it as well.
On the Screenwriters side of things I’ve worked up a range of what I call ‘skeleton’ designs to the directions I could go in for the MA students to pick from. I learnt this in my second year, when proposing designs to a client don’t focus on what you want to do but rather, with broad strokes show what you can do, so you can learn more about what the client would like out of the project. I also got to grips better with my stories by reading the scripts, this really elevated what ideas I came up with and what I was able to create.
One more event that I think it’s important to mention is that socks that I designed are now being sold! Gil Kahana from Chatty Feet sent me a batch of them from the production. I am very happy to see them in reality. I’m fairly sure this is the first paid project I have completed professionally and I’m glad to see it realised. This will look great on my website and I can use my connection with Kahana here to help my work in the industry.
Blog Date: 10/11/23
There’s not much time now until the final presentation of our posters for the MA Screenwriters pitch, something that has struck me specifically this week, I know the next two weeks I’ll need to pick up the pace in finalising, and polishing the posters through speaking with the scriptwriters. Since the last blog update I think I might have slowed in communication with my scriptwriters, focusing maybe more on the Walker books pitch and starting to consider my SIP for next term. After I proposed the skeleton concepts to my scriptwriters, oscar was happy for me to go ahead with one of the concepts I’ve whipped up already without much editing, this being a surreal shot of the White Cliffs of Dover, dripping with blood, this being a key setting at the climax of ‘Somebody Screaming Somewhere.’ I’m very happy to go ahead with this. On the other hand, Matthew who writes ‘Special Yellow Blossom’ and I have been working together on a new set of skeleton concepts, honing in on what we want to visually show with the poster. He sent me an image of an illustrated Black Swan poster he liked, which I really appreciate as I can tell he’s definitely taken into account my style and I think my work is better for it. He wanted the adult figure in some of my previous drawings to be replaced with a more childlike one to reflect the true form of the protagonist of the story, that along with emphasising the towering sunflowers that are constant through the story. I appreciate this feedback and can see my ‘Special Yellow Blossom’ poster starting to take shape, it’s the script that I felt less of a connection with and didn’t have as many visual ideas for so this is a welcome improvement.
At this point in the Walker Books project I am now starting to complete the required spreads for the pitch. This project alongside the Netflix brief has pushed me to think more about colour and tone in my digital art. I’ve been using different tools and thinking about other software that I could use to hone in on my outcome, I think to complete my posters I will definitely be using both Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop along with my go-to digital art software ‘Autodesk Sketchbook.’ I’ve really enjoyed trying to capture the relationship between the monochrome and the colour of the pages, though I think this could be improved as I go along, you can see this as one page I scraped halfway through, I knew I could do better. In my tutorials so far i’ve received good and positive feedback from my peers and lecturers, I think my ideas have a strong spark and foundation and i’m on track, right now the advice I’ve been given is to hone in on the way I present which of course will matter in the final pitch to Walker, and also to consider more the non-fiction aspect of the pitch, grounding the fantastical elements.
The most exciting thing I have been working on recently is developing my Self Initiated Project (SIP) which properly begins next term. It’s something I have considered various ideas since I knew I’d be on this DPS year but now I am taking it obviously more seriously. One goal I have also had in this DPS year is to collaborate with other designers. My best friend on the course also happens to be taking the DPS year. We've always had similar interests, slightly different ambitions but I think we’ve always wanted to work together on something and we’ve decided we want to work on a combined SIP. We built off Fred’s initial idea to create a sort of culture zine, mixed it with our illustrative practices and chemistry together and have come up with a fun quarterly interview magazine.
This would be loosely based on the idea of ‘Desert Island Discs’ a radio interview show where guests name the top albums they’d want to keep them company stranded on a desert island. Our magazine will be longer form and will be called ‘Five Four Three Two One.’ Right now the plan is for each of our guests to have fun creating their own personal “desert island scenario” or “nightmare” scenario, then we ask them what things they would take from the outside world to keep them sane. This includes: five albums, four publications, books, comics etc. three films or television shows, two different meals, and one luxury item. We recorded a demo where Fred interviewed me, and we plan to interview him sometime in the future. It was a lot of fun and I’m very excited to develop this SIP.
Blog Date: 24/11/23
As I am writing this I have just this week had the final presentation and then hand in for the MA Screenwriters poster live brief. In the past two weeks I’ve refined my ideas into tangible and polished posters, creating a presentation that unfortunately became needless during the final meeting. For ‘Somebody Screaming Somewhere’ Oscar and I had already come up with a composition for the final outcome. In producing this I decided to take on a new process in image making that I’ve not used before, mixing programs I’m more comfortable with and others I would like to be.
I began with my analog sketch from my sketchbook, I took that into Adobe Illustrator, a program that is accepted as an industry standard though I’ve never got the hang of it. In the past I’ve felt it turns my digital art techniques on their head, using it as little as possible, but I’ve realised it’s a skill I really need so I’ve returned to it. At this stage I use Illustrator to block in the colours, where I have increased technical ability to shift and edit shapes. Then I took the Illustrator image to my more familiar program Sketchbook. Here I began to look at textures, smoothing out shapes and adding details that I could only do with brushes from this program’s angle. It’s here that I also filled out the background, using a relatively new watercolour brush, this is part of a new target of mine to develop my skills with tone and colour on the digital plane. I’m really proud of what I’ve achieved here, it’s leagues above any sky or backdrop I’ve illustrated before.
Then funnily enough I took this image back to Illustrator where I added the text, scrolling through the Adobe options, making use of the filters available. For ‘Someone Screaming Somewhere’ I was set on a sans-serif font, gritty and bold to match the script, inspired by other UK police dramas. The one I ended up using was “Peckham Press” . I love the textured feel and I think it perfectly matched what I was going for. Finally I took this image into Adobe Photoshop, where I used the camera raw filter to add more texture in grain and edit with haze, contrast and saturation. I love what I’ve created here.
For ‘Special Yellow Blossom’ I had still been in the conceptual phase with Matthew and had opted to make the imagery more illustrative, amping up the image of the sunflower, and shrinking the main character to highlight her youth, framing her perspective, lost and feeling powerless.
Again with this poster I went through the same technical process: colour blocking in Illustrator, details and an artistic element in Sketchbook, back to Illustrator for text (where I opted for a daintier and skinny serif font, aiming to capture the whimsy required for the poster), then onto Photoshop to add finishing touches. This poster I’m not as happy with compared to ‘Somebody Screaming Somewhere.’ Maybe I struggled to capture the abstract nature of the script or I ended up prioritising the first poster, this is not to say I’m not very proud of it, though I think if I had another chance I may want to look at it from a different angle.
Our presentation took place very close to the final submission so I made sure to iron out any creases with my clients before the presentation, though I did make some technical tweaks to ‘Somebody Screaming Somewhere,’ resizing the text so as to not ride the edges of the poster.
I’m happy with these posters at submission, throwing myself into these scripts and fresh ideas has been a total joy and I think I’ve learnt a lot both technically in the ways I should work. I think I’ve suffered a bit of a burnout during this term however which has impacted my work here, I think the ideas here is great and the execution is nice, but I see way in which I could have tightened up the concepts and the imagery, with a little more time or a more mature outlook on the project. Lessons from these images I will take on undoubtedly through the next term.
Mentioned at the start of this blog, the Topolski project has been on the backburner for me this term but we have a meeting at the gallery next month, and I will be building on my existing work created in preparation for DPS in May of this year. At this point I’ve built a collection of sketches, concepts for three A2 images, two of which I’ve begun sketching. At the start of September we had a meeting with students and Sarah who leads the project. I showed my work, monochromatic ink work, my first piece which highlights the tight police presence at the palace. I was recommended to add colour to highlight this further. I’m taking this on board as I complete this piece. I’ve also been working composing the second piece, which frames the religious zealots recruiting in the crowds at Trafalgar Square. I’ve also been inspired by another student on the project Ed, who’s work doesn't just focus on the crowd but also on their experiences at home during the televised coronation. Last May I was in the Bow Library on Roman Road where the coronation was being televised. It was fascinating observing the people who had come to a library to watch an event of such a magnitude. I want this to be the framing of my third piece. I will be working on all three pieces this month.